My comments to Tao Te Ching

torstai 2. maaliskuuta 2017

Tao-te-ching teaches that you should do things in your own ways. Then they are on a healthy ground. That way you also learn best. You should also follow your own homeculture's ways. That way your country is on a strong ´ground and things in the world do not get decided by faraway nations on grounds that do not apply to your country.

In the eyes of some Tao-te-ching seems to say that there should not be any polici, but that is not so. Tao-te-ching teaches that you should find moral in yourself, in the natural ways to arrange the society, so your common sense would back up the moral guidelines and so you would find it easy to talk others into following them. People live in a society. It is good to be skilled, yet one needs the help of others. It makes sense that some take care of also the task of guiding or forcing people to behave morally, somehow what is understood should take effect in practise and that seems to demand it has some force backing it up, and common sense says that it is some police like thing, even though in some societies the tasks of the police may be diuvided to the whole group.

Tao-te-ching seems to also say that there is something wrong with religion, but the point appears to be against artificial forcing, against rigid forms replacing heart-felt religion, against losing the profound ideas in religion, and not against heart-felt religiousness which we find in our own nature.

torstai 22. lokakuuta 2015

"Those who think most of some subject are usually not skilled in it. Either they are slow witted or not talented in it or they have some need unmet and that is why they spend time thinking of the subject, like the hungry tend to think of food and those who eat unhealthily may be obsessed with food thoughts, and like people when they run to some problem, spend time thinking about a solution to it. Instead those who think the subject through but do it very quickly among other things and do not spend time in the subject, typically know it well, especially if their understanding and ways of living tend to be good in such respects."
(A quotation from my blog http://feelingcomputers.blogspot.fi
from the text about commenting on building a virtual world, in the
sense of governing the societies by a computer network guided by
people's pictures of the world)

"The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao..."
When teaching something or when building something, you typically have some building blocks and you build some kind of structures from them by some similarly taught skills to achieve your goals in the building work. Learning things from books or in school is like this too.
So you have some single goal that you want to buikd something or to have the skill of building things like that. And that goal motivates you to spend some of your time in the building work or in studying it. So during those moments that single goal of building dominates your life, you are concentrated to that work and that takes away a large part of your energy from the other sides of your life.
But there are many things in life. Like walking on a street you can see different kinds of people, some houses, children playing, sights of gardens, cars driving, glimpses to homes, the weather, the feel of you walking, thinking of your day, social encounters, plants and animals etc. If you lift one of these to be a subject of conversation that still aren't your whole wisdom about how to live your life. With each skill you need the backing of a strenght and wisdom bought to you by healthy kind of life with a multitude of things and skills in it.
In school the most stupid ones are the ones who rely solely on school. The most intelligent ones are interested in life, in sports and arts and in social relationships, practical life with many things to do: they get added capacity from doing many kinds of things fullheartedly.

So the new perspective to the book is that maybe someone wrote them when hearing lots of advices from the more skilled ones and kind of dizzy in the head from so peculiar opinions about what to do and what to left undone.
On the other hand, Tao Te Ching advices that a leader, like a teacher in a sense might be, should follow the people and do things naturally. So maybe someone writing wanted to start from the common starting point and see things like the more stupid students saw, and kind of grow from that ground to wisdom.
But of course viewpoint is much of what skill is about, so one should indeed use understandablöe language but so finely skilled viewpoint that it lifts the results to a high amount of skill from an ordinary person.

In the 1990's I read Stephen Mitchell's superb English translation of the 2000 years old Chinese classic Tao-Te-Ching. You can propably find it in the internet, http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html . I haven't liked other translations of Tao-Te-Ching.
After that I haven't been reading the book, but now when I took it to my hand I saw the texts from the perspective of who else might have read Tao-Te-Ching and how they had misinterpreted things. So I felt that maybe I would try to explain some of the most common misunderstandings away, namely the misunderstandings of stupid persons by an intelligent person. So I will explain some basic theory and explain away some misunderstandings that come easily if one does not read the book as a whole.